um i don't really know what this is (wc: 3374)
(Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi)
It's human nature to take things for granted. For the past three years, Joni Mitchell's haunting voice has run through my head. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.
Breathing is so natural and easy. You never think about doing it and even when you do you rarely think about how amazing it is and where you'd be without it.
As I slowly took steps further and further down the street, my feet came to a halt so I could focus on my first order of business. I threw my head back and closed my eyes, sucking all the air I could through my nose. I felt it tickle the back of my throat and expand my chest until it couldn't hold any more. Gradually lowering it again, I opened my eyes and let what I didn't need escape through my barely parted lips. The day was overcast, throwing an even darker shade of gray over the pavement and buildings that were mostly gray anyway. It didn't dampen my mood at all. I hoped for rain.
Prison isn't like the movies. Then again, what is? Don't get me wrong - it's awful. It's not someplace you ever really want to be. But three years ago, being walked to my cell in a grey jumpsuit that let me know for the foreseeable future that I'd no longer be "James", but "prisoner 6137", I thought it was. I imagined every barred door sporting heavily tattooed and thickly muscled arms waving from it, reaching to "welcome" me. I waited for a rough, menacing voice to make a catcall at me as I was ushered past them. I felt all eyes were on me, and all of them could tell I was gay. The ends of my lips curved slightly at the conceit of that memory.
In reality, my existence in that place had gone largely unnoticed by everyone. I was quiet and a loner; I kept my head down and did what I was told. Which was, to my complete shock, never to stick a fellow inmate's dick in my mouth. I had been approached. Threatened, even. Considered giving in once or twice as well. Contrary to popular belief, gay men don't actually like rape any more than anyone else and prison guards aren't all assholes that just want to beat things with nightsticks.
I chewed at the fleshy inside of my cheek, screwing up my face as I began walking again. No specific destination was in my mind, but I knew I wanted my first cigarette in three years. I was sure you could get smokes somewhere in my incarceration - at least, that's what movies had told me - but I wasn't sure who I'd have to approach or what I'd have to trade, so I had figured my cell bars were better than a patch. I had no physical or even mental craving for the nicotine after all this time, but the thought of it still made me cheerful. I could stop at a convenience store, I could buy myself a pack, and I could smoke the whole damn thing one right after the other, if I wanted to.
I entered the first building that looked like it could contain what I wanted, not caring where my first sticks of freedom came from, but at the same time taking a careful mental note of the sign that informed me in bold red letters that this was MIKE'S MART. Wanting to remember everything about this ordinary place that everyone else took for granted, I felt an air of superiority despite myself.
Any air of anything that clung to my body left me as soon as I entered the store, especially that filled my lungs. Tingles of anxiety shot through my arms and legs causing me to lean sideways and grasp the side of the red newspaper stand that stood to my left for support. Every color of the rainbow, some I swore that I had never seen before, seemed to jump out at me from the shelves of brightly colored glass and candy wrappers. I squeezed my eyes shut and relished in the blackness they provided me with as I tried to regain composure. Berating myself for being afraid of colors didn't seem to help much, but I felt the freedom enter my tight chest again as I repeated that I didn't want to take anything for granted anymore.
My vision returned and in paranoia I checked to see if the clerk was giving me a weird look. She was lazily flipping through a magazine, smacking gum and seeming completely unaware of my presence, even though a bell tied to the door had announced my entrance only seconds earlier. I studied her; her unperceptive countenance allowing me to do so without seeming like I was leering or being a creep. She wasn't attractive (and not just because of my preference), but her sheer femininity held me chained to the tile like the prisoner I had been only days before.
I took in the sight of her caked on makeup, gathered harshly in her crow's feet and laugh lines and laid thickly over her eyelashes. Her hair was curly and shiny, pulled back loosely behind her neck to keep it out of her way. I even found myself looking at her breasts, although I was sure if she minded straying eyes she wouldn't have been wearing a v-neck with quite that much of a V. My sudden fascination with the opposite sex died down a bit as the door's bell rang out and a man exaggerated a sigh behind me, maneuvering around my still-captive body and heading straight for whatever he wanted.
Not trusting myself to speak just yet, convinced that if I did my heart would beat up and right out of my throat, I quickly turned my back on the clerk and headed down one of the isles, but not before spying the little red and white box I wanted displayed on the shelves behind her.
The isle I had chosen seemed painfully long and full of nothing but bags of chips, calling out to me with their flashy packing of bright oranges and greens. My mouth started to salivate with the memory of their sweet and spicy flavors all mingling in my mouth at once. I pushed past anyway, only stopping when a solid glass door showcasing the liquid version of every fruit imaginable blocked my way. Scanning my eyes over the selection, I shoved my hands in my jacket and pretended to be deciding while I took a minute to catch my breath, thankful that the periphery of colors was no longer in my vision.
My teeth returned to my cheek to pick at it some more and I decided that I had enough money to actually get myself a drink and a pack of cigarettes. I was sure I'd need one anyway; I was about to cough up a lung and scratch the hell out of my throat all over again. While I pulled the glass door open to pull a bottle of orange juice away from it's own penitentiary, something to the right of me moved and I turned my head to observe what it was.
All I noticed at first was the hair - golden hair that barely came to my waist as it swung past me, and I knew it was a child. The boy waved a red candy bar in his hand with delight, up at an older man who ignored him to survey the selection of alcohol. I was sure he asking questions, his mouth moving rapidly with his excited movements, but I had lost all ability to hear. My entire body felt cold and I shivered violently, sure that all the blood in my body had left me. I almost dropped the glass bottle in my hand, but grasped it tighter in response until I thought I would break it anyway.
I wasn't supposed to be around children. From what I had taken away from my confusing and infuriating trial, I was classified as a sexual "offender" and not a "predator", although before I hadn't known there was a difference and I still wasn't sure what it was. This meant, my state-appointed and completely detached lawyer had told me, that I wasn't legally bound to stay away from children, but I had better do it anyway.
I wasn't attracted to someone because they were younger than me. I wasn't attracted to kids. I certainly wasn't attracted to this kid, and the thought of that at all made me physically ill, sure I was going to drop the glass bottle that hung dangerously loose between my fingers for the second time. Fuck, my parents were nearly a decade apart in age. But for the rest of my life I'd be branded. I'd have a big red stamp of PEDERAST on my record for falling for someone merely three years my junior. It was what had infuriated me most when charged; it had been right after my twentieth birthday and he had been coming up on his eighteenth. That wasn't even three years, not really, and so what if it were? I hadn't understood - I still didn't understand, the anger making the blood rush back into my body and across my face - why there couldn't be some sort of exception for that. Besides, as stupid as it sounded, in my defense three years ago and as I repeated it to myself now, we had loved each other. Or whatever we thought was love, anyway, at that age.
But like most parents, his were beyond infuriated when they caught us. Angry, scared, shocked, and ready to punish me for turning their son gay. Which I hadn't, of course. Brian was gayer than I was, stereotypically Madonna-and-musicals-loving gay, which his parents maybe would have picked up on if they had paid any attention to him prior to seeing him having sex with another man. The most ironic part being that he had been with other guys before and I hadn't.
Of course the rape kit had come back inconclusive, and although both of us insisted that it was consentual, they had made him suffer through it anyway. He was a minor so his voice didn't matter; I was a pedophile so neither did mine. The hysterical, homophobic parents were all anyone could hear.
It hadn't mattered much these past three years, wasting away the time drawing and reading around men older than me until I could waste it away however else I wanted again. Brian hadn't visited me, and even though I knew that five months into my sentence he had turned old enough to do so if he wanted to, I didn't expect that he ever would. He had been embarrassed, outed, and put through almost as much as I had. I understood that he just wanted to get past it.
The golden head bounced out of my sight and towards the cashier behind his father, who had finally decided on the pack of beer he wanted. I shook my head as if to shake the vivid memories of everything from my mind, but it didn't work.
No longer wanting to take in anything but just wanting to leave, I urged my long legs across the store as fast as I could and stood uncomfortably behind the boy in line and felt my entire body relax when his shiny bowl-cut disappered into his car parked out front.
"Next!" the cashier practically yelled at me, as if it were the third time she'd said it. It probably was. Her nose was snubbed up at me and her lip practically curled in disgust. I wondered briefly what problem made her want to make her unattractive face even uglier as I stepped forward and placed the bottle on the counter. Only briefly, because the horrifying realization that I had been staring at the boy the entire time he was in the store punched me in the stomach. I wasn't sure whether she had picked up on that or she was just being as rude as ever, but I still felt the nausea all the way up into my throat.
"Marlboro reds, please," I said quietly to her, grabbing the first lighter I saw on the stand next to her and setting it next to my juice. I thanked a God I didn't believe in they were there, because I had completely forgotten that I needed something to light the damn things. "100s."
"ID, please," she mirrored, and I wondered for a second if she was mocking me, before extending my ID card towards her between my index and middle finger, knowing I still didn't quite look twenty-three, much less over thirty. I had never gotten my driver's license.
"This is expired," the clerk informed me with an edge of exasperation to her voice. My shoulders dropped and I only blinked stupidly at her in return. I turned the card around to make sure, but I knew she was right. I hadn't used it in three years, after all.
"Fuck..." I let myself trail off, in realization more than anger.
Something about the word seemed to have affected the impolite woman behind the counter, because as I said it she scanned the store quickly and then shrugged, informing me that the total came well above what she should be charging me for a bottle of orange juice.
I replaced my card and handed the woman the money, paranoid as hell but not caring because I really, really wanted a cigarette after all of this. I wanted to get away from all these god damn colors.
She completed the rest of the transaction quickly and carelessly, flinging my bag at me much in the same manner she flung her departing words and went back to her magazine.
I exited as quick as I could. I ripped the flip top and just as crudely tore at the foil that held the nicotine back from me. I had finally gotten the cigarette to my lips and turned myself back towards the store to cup it in my hand and light it, when I stopped. MIKE'S MART stared back at me, the sign now faintly glowing with fluorescence in the light of dusk. The apostrophe blinked sporadically, and for some reason I couldn't place but felt just as stupid anyway, I had the distinct feeling it was waving at me. Heaving the heaviest sigh of my life thus far, I pulled the cigarette from my mouth and dropped my hands to my sides.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot...
I couldn't let Joni down, could I? Was I really going to take my first cigarette in three years for granted, suck it down in anxiety in front of this shady convenience store? Or was I going to make it a proper celebration of living past all the shit I and my name had been drug through?
I tucked the red and white box safely into the inside pocket of my jacket. Resuming my saunter back the way I had come, I appreciated the anticipation of not knowing where I was going to enjoy my first stick of freedom but relishing in the fact that I could have it wherever I wanted. I admired the twilight clouds as I did, thinking the colors prettier and more organic than anything the store had offered me.
Before my lifetime behind the bars of my cell, I never walked with my head up. There wasn't much to see, I had thought. Colorless sides of buildings, useless things in shop windows, boring people hurrying towards whatever their destinations were. When I did, I definitely never bothered to savor the purity of the colors in the sky.
Approaching the corner of my new home's street, situated a careful distance from any playgrounds or schools, I dryly remembered, a silvery glint coaxed me towards it from behind a large plot of overgrown trees rising and sinking in the wind. Changing direction and walking opposite my street, I met the shining metal and pulled back the branches to reveal a staircase.
It almost hurt my neck to look up to the top; the rocky ascent climbing four flights of stairs, encased entirely in the branches and vines that crowned it. I opened my mouth in a smile for the first time that day, the night air washing cooly over my gums. I had remembered reading about stairs like these in a small article in the LA Times, a habit now that I never possessed before all of my free time behind bars.
There were nearly 400 of these treasures all over the city - built early in the twentieth century when people actually bothered to walk places and enjoy the scenery. It was beautiful, especially in the moonlight, which struggled to filter it's way through a thick ashen cloud sprawled out before it.
I made my way up two-thirds of the stairs before I was winded and sat down. I touched the red, leathery petals of some sort of ground-crawling vine that had managed to fight its way along the trees and display itself proudly among their branches.
Although not as bright, (but much more appealing) the red reminded me of container I had been saving against my chest. I pulled it out slowly this time, frowning and regretting that I had torn the box before, but letting my regret slip away quickly as I wrapped my lips around the cigarette again. I figured regret - for anything - was the most useless thing I could fill my head or heart with ever again.
I lit it carefully, almost crossing my eyes to watch the bright orange as it began to burn and release it's pollution. My chest hurt immediately and I coughed, not bothering to stifle it, observing the burning sensation it gave the back of my throat.
Taking a sip of my orange juice, I rolled it around my mouth and savored the acidity before letting it slip down and both soothe and add to the burn in my throat.
The cigarette found it's way to my lips again and I sucked hard this time, breathing as deeply as I could, now holding back my body's rejections in order to take full pleasure from it. I flipped my ashes to the stairs below me and listened to the trees whisper their approval in the wind with my mouth hung wide open. I kept my throat closed, trapping the smoke in my chest behind the confining bars of my ribs.
The gray smoke swirled from the end of the cigarette in thin wafts, pulled up to hover above me in a suspended cloud. I finally let the smoke escape my lips, setting it free softly in a rushing stream at first, then pausing to let it out in short, playful puffs as the capacity of my lungs neared.
I took a deep breath of the fresh night air and the fragrant, budding trees that were keeping me company. I let the cigarette burn for awhile, watching it's exhaust intently. It looked a comforting gray against the definite black of the sky and the twinkling white of the stars. An indefinite gray, a liberated one, not confined to the darkness of black or the starkness of white.
I wished then that the world saw more shades of gray. I didn't want to be branded with the darkness of "pedophile" but I wasn't quite sure I wanted the starkness of exoneration, either. It felt too much like forsaking anything I had ever felt for or done with Brian, like saying he had never meant anything to me. I wanted the world to see the shades of gray that I did; that the murkiness of knowing Brian was a minor and the brightness of knowing that I also loved him combined into a cloudy, vague gray area.
I finished the rest of my freedom there on those steps, content in my own gray area of knowing and seeing that which most never do.
umm. idk. i tried to use a lot of colors and metaphors, some foreshadowing, lots of references and analogies to being free and also being trapped. 'my free time behind bars' made me smile. yeah stuff.
these stairs exist by the way. all over los angeles. i don't make this shit up.
i don't know what it's like to be in prison, released from it, or a gay man, but i thought this might be a nice exercise in being inside someone else's head. the details don't really matter in a short dribble piece that's not going to be continued, but i did a little bit of research so i wouldn't sound completely dumb. anyway this was originally supposed to be a lot shorter but i was having fun with this guy's voice. LOL NOT GOOD
whyareallmymalecharactersgay
It's human nature to take things for granted. For the past three years, Joni Mitchell's haunting voice has run through my head. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.
Breathing is so natural and easy. You never think about doing it and even when you do you rarely think about how amazing it is and where you'd be without it.
As I slowly took steps further and further down the street, my feet came to a halt so I could focus on my first order of business. I threw my head back and closed my eyes, sucking all the air I could through my nose. I felt it tickle the back of my throat and expand my chest until it couldn't hold any more. Gradually lowering it again, I opened my eyes and let what I didn't need escape through my barely parted lips. The day was overcast, throwing an even darker shade of gray over the pavement and buildings that were mostly gray anyway. It didn't dampen my mood at all. I hoped for rain.
Prison isn't like the movies. Then again, what is? Don't get me wrong - it's awful. It's not someplace you ever really want to be. But three years ago, being walked to my cell in a grey jumpsuit that let me know for the foreseeable future that I'd no longer be "James", but "prisoner 6137", I thought it was. I imagined every barred door sporting heavily tattooed and thickly muscled arms waving from it, reaching to "welcome" me. I waited for a rough, menacing voice to make a catcall at me as I was ushered past them. I felt all eyes were on me, and all of them could tell I was gay. The ends of my lips curved slightly at the conceit of that memory.
In reality, my existence in that place had gone largely unnoticed by everyone. I was quiet and a loner; I kept my head down and did what I was told. Which was, to my complete shock, never to stick a fellow inmate's dick in my mouth. I had been approached. Threatened, even. Considered giving in once or twice as well. Contrary to popular belief, gay men don't actually like rape any more than anyone else and prison guards aren't all assholes that just want to beat things with nightsticks.
I chewed at the fleshy inside of my cheek, screwing up my face as I began walking again. No specific destination was in my mind, but I knew I wanted my first cigarette in three years. I was sure you could get smokes somewhere in my incarceration - at least, that's what movies had told me - but I wasn't sure who I'd have to approach or what I'd have to trade, so I had figured my cell bars were better than a patch. I had no physical or even mental craving for the nicotine after all this time, but the thought of it still made me cheerful. I could stop at a convenience store, I could buy myself a pack, and I could smoke the whole damn thing one right after the other, if I wanted to.
I entered the first building that looked like it could contain what I wanted, not caring where my first sticks of freedom came from, but at the same time taking a careful mental note of the sign that informed me in bold red letters that this was MIKE'S MART. Wanting to remember everything about this ordinary place that everyone else took for granted, I felt an air of superiority despite myself.
Any air of anything that clung to my body left me as soon as I entered the store, especially that filled my lungs. Tingles of anxiety shot through my arms and legs causing me to lean sideways and grasp the side of the red newspaper stand that stood to my left for support. Every color of the rainbow, some I swore that I had never seen before, seemed to jump out at me from the shelves of brightly colored glass and candy wrappers. I squeezed my eyes shut and relished in the blackness they provided me with as I tried to regain composure. Berating myself for being afraid of colors didn't seem to help much, but I felt the freedom enter my tight chest again as I repeated that I didn't want to take anything for granted anymore.
My vision returned and in paranoia I checked to see if the clerk was giving me a weird look. She was lazily flipping through a magazine, smacking gum and seeming completely unaware of my presence, even though a bell tied to the door had announced my entrance only seconds earlier. I studied her; her unperceptive countenance allowing me to do so without seeming like I was leering or being a creep. She wasn't attractive (and not just because of my preference), but her sheer femininity held me chained to the tile like the prisoner I had been only days before.
I took in the sight of her caked on makeup, gathered harshly in her crow's feet and laugh lines and laid thickly over her eyelashes. Her hair was curly and shiny, pulled back loosely behind her neck to keep it out of her way. I even found myself looking at her breasts, although I was sure if she minded straying eyes she wouldn't have been wearing a v-neck with quite that much of a V. My sudden fascination with the opposite sex died down a bit as the door's bell rang out and a man exaggerated a sigh behind me, maneuvering around my still-captive body and heading straight for whatever he wanted.
Not trusting myself to speak just yet, convinced that if I did my heart would beat up and right out of my throat, I quickly turned my back on the clerk and headed down one of the isles, but not before spying the little red and white box I wanted displayed on the shelves behind her.
The isle I had chosen seemed painfully long and full of nothing but bags of chips, calling out to me with their flashy packing of bright oranges and greens. My mouth started to salivate with the memory of their sweet and spicy flavors all mingling in my mouth at once. I pushed past anyway, only stopping when a solid glass door showcasing the liquid version of every fruit imaginable blocked my way. Scanning my eyes over the selection, I shoved my hands in my jacket and pretended to be deciding while I took a minute to catch my breath, thankful that the periphery of colors was no longer in my vision.
My teeth returned to my cheek to pick at it some more and I decided that I had enough money to actually get myself a drink and a pack of cigarettes. I was sure I'd need one anyway; I was about to cough up a lung and scratch the hell out of my throat all over again. While I pulled the glass door open to pull a bottle of orange juice away from it's own penitentiary, something to the right of me moved and I turned my head to observe what it was.
All I noticed at first was the hair - golden hair that barely came to my waist as it swung past me, and I knew it was a child. The boy waved a red candy bar in his hand with delight, up at an older man who ignored him to survey the selection of alcohol. I was sure he asking questions, his mouth moving rapidly with his excited movements, but I had lost all ability to hear. My entire body felt cold and I shivered violently, sure that all the blood in my body had left me. I almost dropped the glass bottle in my hand, but grasped it tighter in response until I thought I would break it anyway.
I wasn't supposed to be around children. From what I had taken away from my confusing and infuriating trial, I was classified as a sexual "offender" and not a "predator", although before I hadn't known there was a difference and I still wasn't sure what it was. This meant, my state-appointed and completely detached lawyer had told me, that I wasn't legally bound to stay away from children, but I had better do it anyway.
I wasn't attracted to someone because they were younger than me. I wasn't attracted to kids. I certainly wasn't attracted to this kid, and the thought of that at all made me physically ill, sure I was going to drop the glass bottle that hung dangerously loose between my fingers for the second time. Fuck, my parents were nearly a decade apart in age. But for the rest of my life I'd be branded. I'd have a big red stamp of PEDERAST on my record for falling for someone merely three years my junior. It was what had infuriated me most when charged; it had been right after my twentieth birthday and he had been coming up on his eighteenth. That wasn't even three years, not really, and so what if it were? I hadn't understood - I still didn't understand, the anger making the blood rush back into my body and across my face - why there couldn't be some sort of exception for that. Besides, as stupid as it sounded, in my defense three years ago and as I repeated it to myself now, we had loved each other. Or whatever we thought was love, anyway, at that age.
But like most parents, his were beyond infuriated when they caught us. Angry, scared, shocked, and ready to punish me for turning their son gay. Which I hadn't, of course. Brian was gayer than I was, stereotypically Madonna-and-musicals-loving gay, which his parents maybe would have picked up on if they had paid any attention to him prior to seeing him having sex with another man. The most ironic part being that he had been with other guys before and I hadn't.
Of course the rape kit had come back inconclusive, and although both of us insisted that it was consentual, they had made him suffer through it anyway. He was a minor so his voice didn't matter; I was a pedophile so neither did mine. The hysterical, homophobic parents were all anyone could hear.
It hadn't mattered much these past three years, wasting away the time drawing and reading around men older than me until I could waste it away however else I wanted again. Brian hadn't visited me, and even though I knew that five months into my sentence he had turned old enough to do so if he wanted to, I didn't expect that he ever would. He had been embarrassed, outed, and put through almost as much as I had. I understood that he just wanted to get past it.
The golden head bounced out of my sight and towards the cashier behind his father, who had finally decided on the pack of beer he wanted. I shook my head as if to shake the vivid memories of everything from my mind, but it didn't work.
No longer wanting to take in anything but just wanting to leave, I urged my long legs across the store as fast as I could and stood uncomfortably behind the boy in line and felt my entire body relax when his shiny bowl-cut disappered into his car parked out front.
"Next!" the cashier practically yelled at me, as if it were the third time she'd said it. It probably was. Her nose was snubbed up at me and her lip practically curled in disgust. I wondered briefly what problem made her want to make her unattractive face even uglier as I stepped forward and placed the bottle on the counter. Only briefly, because the horrifying realization that I had been staring at the boy the entire time he was in the store punched me in the stomach. I wasn't sure whether she had picked up on that or she was just being as rude as ever, but I still felt the nausea all the way up into my throat.
"Marlboro reds, please," I said quietly to her, grabbing the first lighter I saw on the stand next to her and setting it next to my juice. I thanked a God I didn't believe in they were there, because I had completely forgotten that I needed something to light the damn things. "100s."
"ID, please," she mirrored, and I wondered for a second if she was mocking me, before extending my ID card towards her between my index and middle finger, knowing I still didn't quite look twenty-three, much less over thirty. I had never gotten my driver's license.
"This is expired," the clerk informed me with an edge of exasperation to her voice. My shoulders dropped and I only blinked stupidly at her in return. I turned the card around to make sure, but I knew she was right. I hadn't used it in three years, after all.
"Fuck..." I let myself trail off, in realization more than anger.
Something about the word seemed to have affected the impolite woman behind the counter, because as I said it she scanned the store quickly and then shrugged, informing me that the total came well above what she should be charging me for a bottle of orange juice.
I replaced my card and handed the woman the money, paranoid as hell but not caring because I really, really wanted a cigarette after all of this. I wanted to get away from all these god damn colors.
She completed the rest of the transaction quickly and carelessly, flinging my bag at me much in the same manner she flung her departing words and went back to her magazine.
I exited as quick as I could. I ripped the flip top and just as crudely tore at the foil that held the nicotine back from me. I had finally gotten the cigarette to my lips and turned myself back towards the store to cup it in my hand and light it, when I stopped. MIKE'S MART stared back at me, the sign now faintly glowing with fluorescence in the light of dusk. The apostrophe blinked sporadically, and for some reason I couldn't place but felt just as stupid anyway, I had the distinct feeling it was waving at me. Heaving the heaviest sigh of my life thus far, I pulled the cigarette from my mouth and dropped my hands to my sides.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot...
I couldn't let Joni down, could I? Was I really going to take my first cigarette in three years for granted, suck it down in anxiety in front of this shady convenience store? Or was I going to make it a proper celebration of living past all the shit I and my name had been drug through?
I tucked the red and white box safely into the inside pocket of my jacket. Resuming my saunter back the way I had come, I appreciated the anticipation of not knowing where I was going to enjoy my first stick of freedom but relishing in the fact that I could have it wherever I wanted. I admired the twilight clouds as I did, thinking the colors prettier and more organic than anything the store had offered me.
Before my lifetime behind the bars of my cell, I never walked with my head up. There wasn't much to see, I had thought. Colorless sides of buildings, useless things in shop windows, boring people hurrying towards whatever their destinations were. When I did, I definitely never bothered to savor the purity of the colors in the sky.
Approaching the corner of my new home's street, situated a careful distance from any playgrounds or schools, I dryly remembered, a silvery glint coaxed me towards it from behind a large plot of overgrown trees rising and sinking in the wind. Changing direction and walking opposite my street, I met the shining metal and pulled back the branches to reveal a staircase.
It almost hurt my neck to look up to the top; the rocky ascent climbing four flights of stairs, encased entirely in the branches and vines that crowned it. I opened my mouth in a smile for the first time that day, the night air washing cooly over my gums. I had remembered reading about stairs like these in a small article in the LA Times, a habit now that I never possessed before all of my free time behind bars.
There were nearly 400 of these treasures all over the city - built early in the twentieth century when people actually bothered to walk places and enjoy the scenery. It was beautiful, especially in the moonlight, which struggled to filter it's way through a thick ashen cloud sprawled out before it.
I made my way up two-thirds of the stairs before I was winded and sat down. I touched the red, leathery petals of some sort of ground-crawling vine that had managed to fight its way along the trees and display itself proudly among their branches.
Although not as bright, (but much more appealing) the red reminded me of container I had been saving against my chest. I pulled it out slowly this time, frowning and regretting that I had torn the box before, but letting my regret slip away quickly as I wrapped my lips around the cigarette again. I figured regret - for anything - was the most useless thing I could fill my head or heart with ever again.
I lit it carefully, almost crossing my eyes to watch the bright orange as it began to burn and release it's pollution. My chest hurt immediately and I coughed, not bothering to stifle it, observing the burning sensation it gave the back of my throat.
Taking a sip of my orange juice, I rolled it around my mouth and savored the acidity before letting it slip down and both soothe and add to the burn in my throat.
The cigarette found it's way to my lips again and I sucked hard this time, breathing as deeply as I could, now holding back my body's rejections in order to take full pleasure from it. I flipped my ashes to the stairs below me and listened to the trees whisper their approval in the wind with my mouth hung wide open. I kept my throat closed, trapping the smoke in my chest behind the confining bars of my ribs.
The gray smoke swirled from the end of the cigarette in thin wafts, pulled up to hover above me in a suspended cloud. I finally let the smoke escape my lips, setting it free softly in a rushing stream at first, then pausing to let it out in short, playful puffs as the capacity of my lungs neared.
I took a deep breath of the fresh night air and the fragrant, budding trees that were keeping me company. I let the cigarette burn for awhile, watching it's exhaust intently. It looked a comforting gray against the definite black of the sky and the twinkling white of the stars. An indefinite gray, a liberated one, not confined to the darkness of black or the starkness of white.
I wished then that the world saw more shades of gray. I didn't want to be branded with the darkness of "pedophile" but I wasn't quite sure I wanted the starkness of exoneration, either. It felt too much like forsaking anything I had ever felt for or done with Brian, like saying he had never meant anything to me. I wanted the world to see the shades of gray that I did; that the murkiness of knowing Brian was a minor and the brightness of knowing that I also loved him combined into a cloudy, vague gray area.
I finished the rest of my freedom there on those steps, content in my own gray area of knowing and seeing that which most never do.
umm. idk. i tried to use a lot of colors and metaphors, some foreshadowing, lots of references and analogies to being free and also being trapped. 'my free time behind bars' made me smile. yeah stuff.
these stairs exist by the way. all over los angeles. i don't make this shit up.
i don't know what it's like to be in prison, released from it, or a gay man, but i thought this might be a nice exercise in being inside someone else's head. the details don't really matter in a short dribble piece that's not going to be continued, but i did a little bit of research so i wouldn't sound completely dumb. anyway this was originally supposed to be a lot shorter but i was having fun with this guy's voice. LOL NOT GOOD
whyareallmymalecharactersgay